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Disk read error

Oddysee

Posted 27 December 2008 - 09:51 AM

Oddysee

Spammer

Banned

88 posts

I brought a brand new pc everything was fine until yesterday. On the intial boot up I get "disk read error". I then press ctrl+alt+delete. It reboots again, perfectly no problems. I have no problems when I'm playing games, using the internet etc and it shuts down fine.

The only problem is when you first turn on the pc and I get "disk read error".

Can someone help me please?

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SRX660

Posted 27 December 2008 - 10:56 AM

SRX660

motto - Just get-er-done

Technician

4,345 posts

Most disk read errors are due to corrupt MBR or a bad sector!

FIXING the MBR.Boot from the windows XP CD, press the "R" key in the setup in order to start the restoration console. Select your windows XP installation from the list, and enter the administrator password. If you never entered any password and do not have more than 1 user on the computer, just hit enter.Enter the command: "FIXMBR" (without the quotes) at the input prompt and confirm the next question with a "Y" (without the quotes). Use exit to restore the computer.

A word of caution.. sometimes there is no adminsitrator password entered (by you) but the program insists on a password.

here's the knowledge base article from Microsoft that shows how to fix the password problem in XP.

If you have a bad sector on the hard drive and fixing the MBR did not fix your problem then you will need to use a repair software from the maker of your hard drive to fix the bad sectors. You WILL need to reinstall Windows XP back onto the drive to do this. So save any data you want to keep, and make sure you write down all the hardware drivers names and versions in the device manager so you can find the drivers again on the internet.

If this does not fix your problem then your hard drive is slowly going bad and losing sectors. It will fail completely at some time in the near future.

The other thing that may have happened is that you have a virus or spyware on the computer that is causing the problem. Check in the Spyware forum to make sure you are clean.

Oddysee

Posted 27 December 2008 - 01:06 PM

Oddysee

Posted 28 December 2008 - 04:24 AM

Oddysee

Spammer

Topic Starter

Banned

88 posts

FIXING the MBR.Boot from the windows XP CD, press the "R" key in the setup in order to start the restoration console. Select your windows XP installation from the list, and enter the administrator password. If you never entered any password and do not have more than 1 user on the computer, just hit enter.Enter the command: "FIXMBR" (without the quotes) at the input prompt and confirm the next question with a "Y" (without the quotes). Use exit to restore the computer